


Summer's Honey Breath

by Kivrin



Series: On the Strength of the Evidence [44]
Category: Grantchester (TV)
Genre: Background Femslash, Caroline Mackenzie - Freeform, Consensual Infidelity, Fluff, M/M, Outdoor Sex, Scotland, Summer, Unconventional Families
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-03 00:41:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12737568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kivrin/pseuds/Kivrin
Summary: Sidney's first day of his first holiday with Geordie and Cathy and Caro at Ardalanish.





	Summer's Honey Breath

The girls take their sandals off the moment Caro steers the car down the ferry gangway, and Sidney has to distract Ivy and Dora with questions about the road to keep them from flinging their shoes at each other. Esme corrects their eager stories - no, it was Aunt Caro _not_ mummy who fell off her bicycle at that curve when she was small just as Dora did, the blueberries are on the _other_ side of the road. Cathy turns and Sidney can see a scolding forming on her lips, but Caro puts a hand on Cathy’s arm and shakes her head; from his angle, Sidney can just see Cathy’s slight smile as she turns back. "Nearly there," Geordie mouths to Sidney, as he bounces David on his knee.

The air pouring in the open windows is warmer than the sea breeze, but still cooler than anything back in Cambridge. Sidney wriggles his toes inside his shoes and stockings and thinks with sudden wistfulness of his own days in sandals, running beside Jennifer in the pram as mum pushed her around the park.

Here and now, they turn from the tarmac road to one of dirt, and then to a well-kept gravel drive, and then, at last, Caro stops the car in front of the lodge.

It’s bigger than Sidney imagined: two stories and dormers in the roof that speak of an attic, all of solid gray stone with white frames to the windows and red trim on the eaves. It isn’t ornate, but Caro’s description of the place as ‘simple’ doesn’t quite fit. Sidney thinks that after the Keatings' narrow terraced house, it must feel like a palace. But the girls have no awe: they launch themselves out of the car the moment it stops moving and scurry, yelping, across the gravel to the lawn. _The shore, please, mummy, now, can we, daddy, please, now, please?!_

"To the shore but not into the water," Geordie says. "Here! Take your brother, and mind him. Dora, you're in charge of David, but all of you, mind Esme, and start back when the sun touches the tops of the pines." He puts David down. "Go with Dodo, Davie, that's it."

Ivy takes David’s other hand and the three younger children race after Esme, across the front of the lodge, past an outbuilding that may have once been a carriage house, and down a path between scrubby pines. Their chatter slowly fades into the distant sound of the waves. Geordie sits down on the running board and sets to untying his own boots.

"It's like walking over coals at first but it means holidays," Geordie says. "Take 'em off." He waves at Sidney's shoes, then goes suddenly shy. "If you like.”

On the other side of the car Cathy and Caro have taken advantage of the sudden quiet to kiss.

"When we've got the luggage in," Sidney says, making a gesture towards the boot.

"Sod the luggage," says Cathy. "It'll keep." Hand in hand, she and Caro go into the house, and Sidney squeezes in  by Geordie to take off his shoes.

Just rolling his socks down makes Sidney sigh in relief. The pattern of the knit is stamped into his shins, and the breeze coming up from the beach feels like a blessing. He undoes his laces, then sticks his thumbs inside the sock at his ankle to pull shoe and sock off together.

Sidney hadn't thought he'd tanned this summer - Leonard had asked if they couldn't pay Ben to do the heavy groundskeeping during the long vac, so Sidney hasn't been out with the scythe. But next to the milky skin of his foot his hands are golden. He pulls off the second shoe and waggles his toes experimentally.

"Did you go on holidays, when you were a lad?" Geordie asks, as he tosses his own shoes back into the car.

"Not like this." Sidney waves at the house, then down towards the the shore. "A holiday camp, once or twice, or a week in a guest house someplace not too dear, with improving museums."  He thinks he knows the answer, but he puts the question anyway. "Did you?"

"Had a week in Hastings with mum’s cousin Elaine, the one time Dad won something on the pools and didn't bet it all again straight off." Geordie takes a deep breath. "Not like this, I didn’t," he echoes Sidney, then shakes his shoulders back and lifts his chin in an exaggerated fashion as if posing for a picture. "Married up, I did."

Sidney's still trying to think how to answer that - the bold contradiction that rises automatically would, he knows, only make Geordie aggressively self-deprecating - when Geordie reaches over to take Sidney's shoes and throw them after his own.

"You'll only need them for town," he says. "Come on, there's a hammock in the shed if the caretaker didn't put it up already for whatever MacKenzie was here last week."

"We oughtn't to...?"

"No, we _oughtn't_." And then, impossibly, wonderfully, right there in the drive he steps close and reaches up to kiss Sidney.

Geordie's skin tastes of the sweat and dust of travel, but also, faintly, of the salt spray from the ferry. Sidney lets his hands move over Geordie's back, tugging his shirt free of damp skin.

"I've wanted you here," Geordie says against Sidney's lips.

Sidney wouldn't have thought, after a day and a half of travel with four children, he'd have the energy to be aroused. But all at once his breath is short, and a trembling starts in the pit of his stomach. From habit he starts to pull away, but Geordie’s hand and the faint roaring of the sea stop him.

"Not just, you know," Geordie slides a thumb into the open collar of Sidney's shirt and rubs over his collarbone. "But having three meals a day with you for more than a day at a time."

Sidney cups the back of Geordie's head with a hand. "Not just... but also, I hope?" He kisses him again, more insistently. "Show me the house?"

"In a bit. The girls, the big girls, will be... getting comfortable upstairs." Geordie grins. "We can be comfortable outside." Another kiss, this one brief but with promises of more to come, and Geordie takes Sidney by the hand. He leads the way across the lawn in the opposite direction to the one the children had taken, around to the back of the house. In a grove of birches perhaps thirty yards further inland, a wide hammock of faded blue and white canvas is strung between two trees. The birch leaves screen the sunlight and, Sidney thinks as he looks back, the view from the upper story of the house. Densely planted pines screen the grove on the other sides.

"One time, early on," Geordie says, as he leads the way across the soft grass, "when I only had a week's holiday, and Cath had gone up earlier with Caro and the girls - just Esme and Dora, then - I got the last ferry over in the evening and walked up."

"That must be ten miles!"

"Seven," Geordie corrects. Then he shrugs. "And a half. All I had to carry was me shaving kit. And I wasn't long off the beat, then, it wasn't what it'd be to me now."

Sidney doesn't reach for the scar on Geordie's side, but he can feel Geordie take a longer stride as if to assure himself - or Sidney - how well it's healed.

"Was late when I got here, all of them in bed," Geordie goes on. "So I kipped out here."  He touches one of the wooden bars that head and foot the hammock, and sets it swinging. "Woke up with Cath and the girls in with me and Caro setting up her camera." He snorts, shaking his head. “She developed it the next day and gave Esme the print to wave at me any time I seemed likely to say no to an ice cream or a late bedtime.”

“Blackmail?”

“Think she’d call it ‘an efficient use of energy.’ Spoiling the girls is her favorite hobby; Cath and I get in the way.”

“Someday,” Sidney says, “I want you to go through the album in your front room and tell me the stories of all the pictures Caro’s taken.”

“That’ll be most of them,” Geordie warns.

“We’ll have to make time.”

Geordie stares past the pines for a moment, then gives Sidney a nudge that turns into a tackle and suddenly they're down in the hammock, Geordie topmost, with his lips on Sidney's collarbone where his hands had been earlier. “Better idea for what we can do with time.”

"Geor..!"

"We've got at least three-quarters of an hour before the girls start back from the shore. And there's no one else for miles." Geordie's slim, clever fingers are working at Sidney's shirt buttons. "And you're not even a vicar in this country."

That isn't how it works, of course, but the sheer distance between him and Grantchester is suddenly a tangible relief, like stepping into a hot bath on a cold night, like putting down a box of prayerbooks. Not a vicar here. Only Sidney. Only Geordie's Sidney.

Sidney kisses Geordie, arching into his body as he reflects, with some distant part of his mind, how the canvas hammock is preferable to the woven-rope variety his aunt and uncle had in their garden. That would barely let one person turn over without threatening to strangle him, much less allow two to be this energetic.

"Good lad," Geordie breathes against Sidney's lips. When Sidney starts to fumble with Geordie's belt, Geordie obligingly shifts to give him better access, though he keeps one bare foot hooked around Sidney's. Their bare feet have tangled before, of course, when they've been in bed together, but somehow this is different.

"What would you like?" Sidney murmurs, when he's tossed both their belts out of the hammock.

Geordie just kisses him again.  "I've wanted you," he repeats. "Here."  He runs a hand over the front of Sidney's trousers. "Lay here, thinking of you."  He starts working on Sidney's fly.

"Tell me," Sidney says. He tries to unfasten Geordie's trousers, but Geordie shakes his head, pushing his hips back out of Sidney’s reach, and kisses him.

"I'd do... this... thinking of you doing it to me." He strokes Sidney's length through the straining fabric of his y-fronts. Sidney raises his hips but Geordie grins wickedly and strokes again, just as lightly. "You, just up from the shore, in that tiny set of shorts, like..." Suddenly shy, he twitches one shoulder and strokes harder.

Sidney kisses him again. "Like what?"

"...merman, or a selkie..."

"And you'd catch me on land?"  Sidney's mouth is dry, dryer than on the dusty train. “Like in the stories?”

"Yeah..." Geordie’s thumb rocks over the head of Sidney's cock and he grins at the noise Sidney makes. "Your skin all cool from the water..." He kisses Sidney's throat. "And your mouth hot..."

Is it pride, that distant part of Sidney's mind wonders, to be gasping with need from a man describing you to yourself? Then Geordie starts working Sidney's pants down and Sidney forgets everything in his fumbling efforts to help.

Their movements rock the hammock, but Geordie keeps a knee firmly down by Sidney's hip and a hand planted by the opposite shoulder, which keeps them from pitching out. When Geordie's freed Sidney's erection, he grins, but doesn't touch. Sidney squirms.

"Please..."

Geordie lifts his free hand, but brings it to his own lips and takes his first finger into his mouth. "I'd do this," he says, between slowly sucking the second finger, then the third. "Wet me hand... " The fourth finger. The thumb. "So when I touched myself..." He draws his tongue over his palm. "It'd feel like your mouth." 

When his wet hand closes around Sidney's length it feels rougher than his lips would, but softer than his dry hand does. Sidney bucks against him and Geordie laughs with satisfaction.

Sidney gets his hand around the back of Geordie's head and pulls him in for an urgent, breathless kiss. Geordie teases for just a moment before he complies, and his hand stays busy, sliding over Sidney's wet skin. The hammock rocks, and Sidney and Geordie rock together, until Sidney gasps.

"Wait... going to..."

"Good," Geordie answers, not pausing. "Good, love, yes, let me hear you..."

It's habit to clench his teeth, to bury his face in Geordie's shoulder, but the swaying leaves overhead seem to echo Geordie's encouragement, so when Sidney comes he lets the almost sobbing cry burst from his throat as the rest of him spills against Geordie.

“Welcome home,” Geordie whispers against his forehead.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Shakespeare's Sonnet 65.
> 
> Thanks once again to the lovely [Crowgirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowgirl/pseuds/Crowgirl) for the beta.


End file.
